THE REAL AUSTRALIAN SOLDIER

Korero (AEWS), Volume 2, Issue 9, 8 May 1944, Page 18

THE REAL AUSTRALIAN SOLDIER

By

in the U.S. Infantry Journal

Training and organization —and more training —make the Aussie what he is—a grand fighting man.

The legend that the Australian soldier is a wild, undisciplined fighting man who owes his success

to some innate instinct for war dies hard. “ Australians are grand fighting men,” a veteran British officer said to me when I was in a , British transport steaming out from London to Egypt in 1940. “ I saw them in the last war. Pity they can’t be disciplined.” “ Our idea of an Aussie,” said Yank, the U.S. Army weekly, last June, “ is a six-footer, standing in a torn and dirty uniform, a rifle in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other, cussing a blue streak and beating hell out of anything that comes along.”

It is a picturesque legend, but, as a matter of fact, saluting and other compliments, parade-ground drill, dress, and bearing in the veteran Australian units to-day is smarter than I have seen in any British regiments except the Guards, and I spent a good part of 1939 and 1940 as an Australian correspondent with the British Army. The system of recruit training which Australia introduced in the Middle East was made the standard system for all troops in the Middle East. From the time Australians assaulted the miniature Hindenburg Line that ringed the Italian fortress of Bardia, through two almost unbroken years of fighting, up to the campaign in the heat and gloom

of the Papuan jungles, “ training and organization ” has been the simple and useful doctrine of the Australian Army in general. In the few particular cases where this doctrine has not been the first and greatest commandment, Australian troops have not done so well. The law that the Australian citizen soldier has been taught in three years of tiresome schools and exciting campaigning is that training does not kill initiative, but strengthens it by adding confidence and skill. It was not because training standards were low that the Australian soldier taught himself how to fire Italian field guns and machine guns, and used them in the defence of Tobruk ; or that, in Greece and Crete, after brigades and battalions had been surrounded or fragmented, companies, platoons, and even squads went on fighting as organized units. To-day the emphasis is still on training and more training, even in veteran units with four compaigns behind them, where officers and sergeants who have fought in four continents are taken out of battalions in the front line at Buna or Gona and beyond, to go to school again in Australia.

The power-house of Australian armytraining, whose current circulates right through the Army from headquarters away to the front line, is the Royal Military College and Staff School, situated

at Duntroon, near Canberra, the Dominion capital. Thirty years ago Duntroon was modelled not on Sandhurst or Woolwich, the British military colleges, but on West Point. It was decided then that Australia would rely on a citizen army with citizen officers, except for a relatively small corps of professionals, who would make up in quality what they lacked in numbers. Consequently Duntroon was designed to give each professional officer a four-year course as at West Point, not an eighteen months’ course as at Sandhurst or Woolwich ; and to train him in all arms—infantry, artillery, engineers, &c. Most engineer specialists also go through a university degree in engineering after the military course is over, and a big percentage of Duntroon graduates go to England or India for a two-year course at one of the staff colleges after they have served in the Army for some years. To-day graduates of Duntroonthe most senior of them are now in their middle fortieslace the Australian Army from top to bottom. A dozen of them are Generals, and half of v®** these are in command of fighting f'vt divisions — Clowes, who pushed the % Japanese marines out of Milne Bay bO 5 - in Papua, is one of them; Berryman, yg? General Blarney’s deputy chief of staff, is another; Vasey, who was Egg the field commander during a vital fe--. phrase in New Guinea, is another; 1 Robertson, Australia’s senior armoured force commander, is a fourth. ■ With them work professional sold- F P iers of an earlier generation, of whom Blarney is one, and citizen soldiers such as Morshead, Allen, and feSg Herring, who have managed to see - so much fighting in this war and Hvd? the last that some of them have won Syv every step in promotion, from pla- HH toon commander to divisional com- ”

mander, in action.

You cannot turn a few tens of thousands of civilians into an army in a week-end ; and when the first instalments of the Australian Imperial Force embarked for the Middle East early in 1940 there were a good many men in its ranks who shared Yank’s idea of an Aussie, “ with

a rifle in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other.” There had been little money to spend on the Army in the years between the wars and, except for the small corps of professional officers and sergeant instructors, and the part-time militia officers who had made soldiering their week-end and evening hobby, there was only a handful of trained soldiers in the country. It was a good thing that Australia sent its Imperial Force overseas almost as soon as it was formed, because that made a break between civilian life in Australia and the soldiers’ life in the big camps in southern Palestine and in the Egyptian Desert. Over there the commanders of the raw force worked on the fairly accurate assumption that the hodgepodge collection of volunteers had everything to learn and mighty little time to learn it in. Officers, from top to bottom, and sergeants were sent off in batches to British Army schools in the Middle East for courses that lasted up to four

months. The men were taught to snap to it on the parade ground and on exercises, to know their weapons until they could handle them blindfolded, to move so fast and far across the dust and stones of the desert that they cursed their commanders for “ forgetting they were not still in the bloody cavalry.”

At Tobruk, just a year after the arrival in Egypt, an Australian brigade trained in this way made a fighting march of twenty miles in one day and fought and won, at the end of it, a tough fight against superior forces whch were backed by tanks.

“ First Libya ” proved to every Australian that training paid. The man who could move fast, though carrying a load of gear that would worry a mule, who could get his weapons into action in split seconds, was less likely to get killed. The battalion and the company that were with a leader who did not lose his way and did not lose control in broken, featureless country, and kept close up behind the barrage, came through with few casualties and many prisoners. It was not the demoniac courage of natural-born fighting men that took the powerful fortifications of Bardia and

Tobrukthough it took plenty of courage to keep on and not go to ground while the machine-gun bullets whipped past knee-high and the shells raised sudden tree-high clouds of dust and whistling steel was a sudden, accurate artillery barrage pounding down on the Italian line, groups of infantrymen who were so close behind it that they were in the Italian posts before the garrisons had recovered their wits. Tanks and infantry were behind the Italian line and among their guns before the Italians knew what was happening.

There were plenty of reinforcements in those days—raw recruits keen to conform with Yank’s idea—but the fighting units that had been through it did not like them that way. Back to the training camps in Palestine the blooded battalions sent their best officers and sergeants to knock the new arrivals from Australia into shape. Each battalion, for example, had to staff a training company back in Palestine from which it would draw its reinforcements. If it did not send back first-class officers and

sergeants to school the new recruits, it would not get first-class reinforcements. As an additional check, if the commander of the training division in Palestine did not approve of the quality of the officers and instructors sent back to him from the units, he returned them and asked the units to choose again. To keep training up to date and to prevent the development of a class of behind-the-line instructors, the officers and N.C.O.s were returned to their units from the training division after they had spent six months there teaching recruits.

Newly-arrived officers were also sent to school for four weeks as soon as they arrived in the Middle East. Every soldier from Australia was put through an eight-weeks course regardless of what training he had done at home ; and, on top of this, specialists were given additional courses. At intervals the sergeantmajors were sent to school. The Australian training division was made the master gauge for training in the Middle East, and three hundred British, South African, New Zealand, Polish, French, and Greek officers were sent to learn its system. It was less than a year old when the greater part of the A.I.F. left the Middle East to fight the Japanese.

By December 7, 1941, the Australian overseas force had fought in the Western Desert, in the mountains of Greece, in Crete, in the bare and rocky ravines of Syria. Japan’s entry meant that they had to learn jungle fighting, and the overwhelming of the Bth Australian Division in Malaya, Amboina, and Timor and Rabaul—it was scattered among all these places—was a challenge. Australian units fresh from bivouacs in the snows of Lebanon began training for jungle warfare in the thickest bush they could find in South Queensland. Other brigades, which were delayed to garrison Ceylon on their way home to Australia, used the Ceylon jungle to train in.

When the veterans arrived home they found that Australia was trying to maintain a far larger army in proportion to her population than America will be maintaining even when the American Army reaches the limit of 7,500,000 men which President Roosevelt has announced.

Some of the brigades which beat the Japanese at Milne Bay and in the Owen Stanley Range trained for those campaigns, working out their own technique of jungle warfare in the forests of Queensland. They had six weeks to get ready for the new kind of fighting in between the time they reached Australia from the Middle East and the time they were in action in New Guinea. Other brigades—and these were the veteran troops—were halted in Ceylon on the way to Australia. There was practically no force on the island to defend it except those Australians at the time when Japanese aircraft were bombing Ceylon, and it seemed likely that Japan’s next big move would be towards Ceylon and Madagascar. The experimental, self-critical, intensely practical Australian brigade—the same which had broken the perimeter defences at Bardia and Tobruk early in 1941 ; had foiled a German blitzkrieg in Greece and had come out unshaken and intact ; and then had fought their hardest battle in Crete and —was one of those which spent four months in Ceylon working out this new jungle warfare. They worked so hard on it that when they departed their memoranda were text-books on jungle fighting. These men were among those who met the Japanese in New Guinea and pushed them back to Gona on the coast, using tactics they had worked out in Ceylon.

The lion’s share of the fighting in the New Guinea campaign has been done not by Yank’s Aussies, but by Australian veterans with three or four long, uncomfortable campaigns behind them ; who have left men they fought with dead in Cyrenaica, Greece, Crete, and Syria. They judge themselves and the men they meet by their ability to do their jobs and their determination not to let their mates down. In this war, as in the last, this simple standard has produced rather better infantry than the Germans could put into the battle, either in France in 1918 or at El Alamein in 1942.